How we share our grandparenting stories

www.raisingyourgrandchildren.com by Karen Best Wright

As I have watched the news lately and read stories about other grandparents raising their grandchildren, I have been haunted by one thing I see grandparents doing. As a grandmother raising my grandchildren, I can see how easy it is to let this happen. It happened to me. I now can also see the harm that could potentially be done.

What I am talking about is talking in public about how these grandchildren have been neglected, abandoned, and abused. While this may be true, and we may need to confide in friends, counselors, or our clergy, I believe it harms the children to hear us refer to them as victims in this way.

In our family, we stress how lucky we are that we have each other. They know they are lucky to have us, and they know we are LUCKY to have them. I don't think it does the children any good for grandparents to stress how different they are from other children. It does not help the children's self-esteem for the whole world to know their personal problems or the problems of their parents.

I learned this lesson in a way that I did not like. After we had our children for about a year, our local Area Agency on Aging did an article about us in their monthly newsletter. I explained in more detail, than I now would, about why we got the children. Well, several months ago I did a Google search and came across that article on the Internet. Boy, was I sorry that I had even been as descriptive as I was.

As my girls grow up, the world does not need to know exactly what they went through as children unless they choose to share it. So my advice if you are being interviewed by a local newspaper or newsletter that will eventually show up on the Internet, be careful using your children's names and details that may come back to embarrass them.